The Greatest Joke (According to Whitney Cummings)

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The Three Amigos raised me because my parents didn't have time. There's this scene where Martin Short, Steve Martin, and Chevy Chase are all on horses in the desert and they are all superthirsty and they all have canteens. Steve Martin turns his over and it's empty. Martin Short turns his over and it's all sand. And then Chevy Chase turns his over and it's full of water and it's going all over him, and then he throws it out. And then he gets a thing of lip balm and just starts putting it on his lips, and to the other guys he's like, "Lip balm?" —WHITNEY CUMMINGS

ABOUT THE COMEDIAN: What makes a joke great for Whitney Cummings is honesty. "I could do another comedian's joke and it would be terrible because it's not authentic or organic to me," says Cummings, who splits her time between stand-up and 2 Broke Girls, which she co-created. "The comedian has to think it's funny. I've never been able to tell a joke that I think is a B-joke and get an A-response. I have to be sold on it first and it has to be true. When I first started I was always trying to please other people and I just truly didn't care and the audience could feel that."

Cummings' selection comes from a seemingly random scene in 1986's Three Amigos, which she watched religiously as a child. It resonates with that same sort of organic energy, genuine to its stars Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short. In her own career, the LA-based comedian's M.O. is seemingly selfish—to only talk about stuff that interests her. But Cummings has learned not to tailor her sets to other people, including her fellow comedians. "I used to be so much dirtier," she says. "I felt like I had to do Holocaust jokes and rape jokes to make the comedians in the back of the room laugh. But that didn't really work. So I was able to stop worrying about what other comedians found funny and worry about what's actually what I want to talk about."

That means filming her joke selection with several other comedians as her audience felt a little weird. Cummings was, however, noticeably pleased to shoot with her former Whitney co-star Chris D'Elia and the pair spent their time onset in the Comedy Store recounting the recent Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber. "I still want to impress comedians," Cummings admits. "But at the same time it's so safe because they get it."

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